China’s Covid Lockdown Outrage Tests Limits of Triumphant Propaganda

//…The failure of the typical tools of narrative control speaks in part to Shanghai’s status as a financial capital, home to many internet-savvy elites. But it also underscores the urgent nature of the complaints. These are not the abstract political critiques or one-off news stories that the propaganda machine has grown adept at stifling or spinning. They are born of life-or-death scenarios, with an immediacy not easily excised by censors.

“The reality is that these past few years, official propaganda has been pretty successful, or at least rarely has met such strong pushback,” Fang Kecheng, a journalism professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who studies media and politics. “We can see this is not a regular situation. The temperature of public opinion is very different.” //